A blog for the United States branch of the global Centre for Fortean Zoology

At the beginning of the 21st Century monsters still roam the remote, and sometimes not so remote, corners of our planet. It is our job to search for them. The Centre for Fortean Zoology [CFZ] is - we believe - the largest professional, scientific and full-time organisation in the world dedicated to cryptozoology - the study of unknown animals. Since 1992 the CFZ has carried out an unparalleled programme of research and investigation all over the world. Since 2009 we have been running the increasingly popular CFZ Blog Network, and although there has been an American branch of the CFZ for over ten years now, it is only now that it has a dedicated blog.

Tuesday, 31 December 2013

Happy New Year to all. Starting a new feature for 2014:
"This Day in Weird." All contributions welcome as we roll along
through weeks and months to come.

Jan. 1, 1891: Sabine Baring-Gould (1823-1934) publishes Freaks
of Fanaticism and Other Strange Events, a compendium of articles on
mysticism.

Jan. 1, 1919: Birth of actress Carole Landis, best known for
her roles in the films One Million B.C. (1940) and Topper Returns
(1941).

Jan. 1, 1970: Around 5:00 a.m., witness Doreen Kendall
reports seeing a "Saturn-shaped object" with lights on its rim,
hovering near her home in Duncan, British Columbia. Two humanoid forms in
tight-fitting jumpsuits are visible inside the craft's upper portion, their
faces concealed by helmets.

Monday, 30 December 2013

Sometimes collecting reports of mysterious creatures can be as simple as taking the time to sit down and talk with your own family members. When I was younger I spent afternoons after school with my aunt. She lives on the boarder of Chesterfield and Amelia Counties. Back then it was and in many ways still is a very wild place. I can remember on more than one occasion getting off the school bus and being greeted by entire flocks of wild turkey. I had also seen on many occasions deer, foxes and ground hogs too. She had even seen a bear or two occasionally, but I never saw those. Because of my love for animals, I asked her had she seen other kinds of animals on her property. She had.

During the mid to late 1970’s she had seen another kind of animal on her property, a mountain lion. I was completely blown away. Mountain lions are one of my favorite animals and I knew that they had lived in Virginia previously, but officially they have been extinct here for over a hundred years, just as they have been officially extinct in the entire Eastern United States (minus Florida) for more than a hundred years. And yet every year from Maine to Georgia, Vermont to Indiana there are hundreds of reported encounters with Mountain Lions.

Right away I started pouring through websites and newspaper archives to try and see if I could find any additional sightings from before or after my aunt’s. I found a great deal of reports from other places in Virginia, but for the longest time nothing from any of the counties close to my home.

I started to give up hope of finding anything, until I stumbled across a rash of Mountain Lion sightings on a local website. The website, Old Dominion Wildlife.com is not a website run by cryptozoology enthusiasts, or even people with a high level of interest in such matters, it is a local website dedicated to people living in Virginia with a love for the outdoors and its wildlife, where people can share pictures of their local wildlife and talk about what they have seen.

But in March 2012 they reported a number of their subscribers in Chesterfield, Amelia, and Surry Counties had started seeing on a regular basis what they could only describe as mountain lions.

Then in mid-December 2012 a couple in Powhatan County, just east of Chesterfield, started hearing loud awful screams at night. Their house cats would always become very frightened whenever such noises where heard. Then one morning the husband found a set of very large cat-like tracks on their property. He had them sent away to be analyzed, but they were returned to him as inconclusive.

The site also featured a photo taken at night of what was claimed to be a mountain lion. The object looks big in the picture and the eyes are quiet large, but it isn’t in focus and is frankly too grainy to tell just what it is.

Looking over these reports I have to say I’m intrigued. Many counties like Amelia, Powhatan, and to Cumberland are still very sparsely populated and filled with all kinds of wildlife. There is certainly enough room and prey for a few mountain lions to live comfortably there. I will keep everyone updated should I come across any new sightings or reports of things like tracks and photos. Until then this is just a friendly reminder to take the time and enjoy the wilderness and the wildlife that is all around you. You never know just what you might find or see.

Editor's note: The mountain lion (Panthera concolor) is identical with the puma or cougar.

Friday, 27 December 2013

Most of you, I surmise, will be familiar with the Road Runner cartoons in which the unfortunate Coyote is forever chasing the Road Runner with scant success. No matter what ruses he uses to catch his quarry, the outcome is forever the same. Not content with merely chasing him, he orders all manner of devices through the mail, but the Road Runner by speed or guile avoids capture and everything backfires on his pursuer. Even before he launches his schemes we know the Coyote is doomed to failure and they will backfire on him, so that he blows himself up, finds himself pursued by a train or falls over a cliff.When he finds himself outwitted, but before the ultimate disaster, an expression of almost resignation comes over the unhappy creature's face and, when you have seen enough of these cartoons, you begin to feel something approaching sympathy for the Coyote.You wish that maybe he could win just once and catch the Road Runner, yet you know that this will never happen, because, as his intentions are clearly prandial, if once he captures him there can be no further cartoons.However, I have now discovered that at least this is no reflection of reality. It turns out that Coyotes are in fact faster than Road Runners. Therefore, the cartoon character's sad pursuit in no way mirrors what actually happens when a real coyote pursues a real road runner.

Tuesday, 24 December 2013

The oldest reported sighting I could dig up from around Chesterfield was from 1976. Two teenage couples where driving in a car down Hull Street Road late one night when suddenly, about 50 feet ahead of them, they saw a large hairy upright creature cross the road. They reported it to the local police, but they were not taken seriously. After all what person in Chesterfield County would believe that something like Bigfoot was roaming around here? For years there were no new sightings, then after more than two decades a fresh case.I live in Chesterfield County, Va., about 30 minutes south of the state capital of Richmond. I have lived here all my life and while I’ve traveled far and wide on vacation and in order to attend college, there is still no other place I would rather call home. For the past several years more and more people have been moving into this once small little county and have transformed it into a little city rather than a residential area. And while many of the local wildlife was chased off by initial development, I’m happy to report that a great number of species are being seen with much more frequency again. They include flocks of wild turkey, deer, rabbits, and groundhogs. But to my great surprise something else is being sighted on occasion, something I thought I would never have heard reports of in my little home town - Bigfoot.

In the summer of 1999 a young man was fishing at a private pond when he noticed something watching him from a nearby hill. He said it was covered in dark hair, moved like a bear, but was between 7-8 feet tall, and stood on two legs.On an October day in 2002 a young couple where enjoying one of their favorite outdoor activities, kayaking in beautiful Pocahontas State Park. It consists of 7600+ acres of thick woods, hiking trails, camp grounds and miles of interconnected ponds, creeks, and small lakes. As dusk approached the couple observed a flock of Great Blue Herons near the shore line and decided to get a closer look.As they got closer they started to notice a terrible smell in the air. Something that smelled like decaying flesh. They then noticed a large greyish brown object floating in the water nearby. It was the bloated carcass of a dead deer. Naturally they didn’t want to get close to a dead deer so they decide to paddle away. As they did, the herons began to become nervous and in an explosive burst they all flew away. They then noticed the sound of something large crashing through the undergrowth on the shore line. It was moving fast and headed in their direction.They started paddling faster and faster. After a short distance they looked back and noticed that the deer carcass was gone. About 5 feet from the shore line they noticed something big moving from the water’s edge into the trees and it was dragging the deer carcass behind it. The couple admits they didn’t get a clear look at it, but they said it was about 6-7 feet tall, covered in brown fur, and seemed to be walking upright. They have since that day gone back to the park several times, but have never again seen something like that.Over the years I have been to Pocahontas Park dozens of times. It truly is a great place to spend an afternoon or even a whole weekend camping. And there is wildlife a plenty, but I don’t know if there would be enough room for something like a Bigfoot to live there undetected.For years everything seemed to be quiet, but then in 2006 there came not just one or two sightings, but an entire wave of fresh reports. In June of 2006 a man was driving outside of the housing development of Woodlake when he noticed a huge hairy creature running alongside the road. Woodlake is a mega-subdivision home to hundreds of houses and thousands of people. It’s hard to image something like Bigfoot being anywhere near such a place, but that year the sights just kept right on coming.The next major break came in October of that year. That is when several locals started hearing loud whooping calls and grunts out in the wooded area in and around Woodlake. Some people found bizarre stick piles in the woods. And at least one foot print was cast. However, the print has no real definitive shape and in all honesty looks to be nothing more than an impression that was found in the woods, but because it was in close approximately to the calls and stick piles were found it was assumed to be from whatever was making them. Yet despite all of this no one besides the driver in June, actually saw any creature. That was about to change.On November, 10, 2006, just off of Bailey Bridge Road at around 11 p.m. 11:00 pm a local we will call Edward heard his two Jack Russell terriers begin to bark wildly. He went outside with a flashlight to see what was going on. There in a creek bend about 35 yards from his porch he saw a large hairy animal crouching down. At first he thought that some kids where trespassing, when suddenly the animal rose up on two legs. Edward said it was between 6-7 feet tall and eyes that reflected in the light. Then the creature shuffled up the creek bed and into the woods on two legs.Finally, at last, someone had actually seen something. Baily Bridge Road is about five minutes from Wood Lake by car and less than two minutes from the place where my grandparents have lived for more than thirty years! When I first heard this I immediately hopped in my car and drove out there. I looked around for a while, but I didn’t find anything.Baily Bridge Road is one of the few places left in Chesterfield with significant woods where few people live and wildlife is still abundant. If there was any place however with a chance of something like this hiding around here, however remote a chance, this would be it.Sightings where sporadic after that, but they did continue, including a group of fishermen in May of 2007 and a couple in September of 2009 who didn’t see a creature yet heard the strange whooping calls like those from a few years earlier.When I started out looking into possible Cryptid sightings in my local area I had no idea that I would find as many as I did, let alone so many reports of something like Bigfoot. I was so puzzled - could something like this exist here?Chesterfield is very populated now, but just a few years ago it was like living out in the middle of nowhere. Chesterfield is also surrounded on both sides by Amelia and Powhatan Counties, both of which are still sparsely populated and full of dense woods with an abundance of wildlife. Maybe something from these counties was occasionally coming over into ours.

The only animal common in all three counties that would be anything close to the size reported are deer. These animals have become quite the pest problem as of late, eating up everything in sight and unfortunately being hit on a regular basis by cars. Yet they really don’t match the physical descriptions of what people where seeing. There is only one animal that occasionally makes its way into Chesterfield County, the American Black Bear.

Black Bears aren’t regular inhabitants of Chesterfield yet they do on occasion turn up. When I was in elementary school one wandered into the neighborhood of one of my best friends. Just a few years ago one was spotted crossing a road near one of the major shopping centers. But most memorable for me was during my freshman year of high school a large bear wondered out of the woods and right on to the football field.

I started to wonder if maybe bears where responsible for what people were seeing. After all the accounts for the most part where vague, or that the person didn’t see an animal they only heard it, and some eyewitnesses used phrases like 'bear-like' to describe what they saw. So I began reading local newspapers to get a firm idea of when these bears were roaming about and I made a surprising discovery. The years where people had the most frequent Bigfoot encounters where the same years that these rouge bears where running loose.

At last I think I have it. The reports of Bigfoot like creatures in my own back yard where most likely people misidentifying a normal animal, albeit one they were not use to seeing on a regular biases in the suburbs. So it seems that bears are the culprits in these cases, but Bigfoot like creatures weren’t the only strange things I started digging up reports of on in my own back yard. But that’s a subject for another day.

Friday, 20 December 2013

When mystery out of place cats are discovered, they are usually identified as "panthers" or "pumas". The only difficulty here is that these terms are often used imprecisely and this leads to confusion.

The word panther originally signified a leopard, but nowadays has generally come to be used of black leopards. These are leopards which are melanistic. the black equivalent, as it were, of albino. However, in the United States a certain confusion has arisen, as the term panther has traditionally been used to mean a puma (Panthera concolor). The puma, to make matters even more confusing, has been known by a variety of other names: painter, mountain-lion, deer tiger, catamount, catamountain and above all, cougar.

Reports of panthers and pumas which should not normally be there have been turning up in many countries in recent decades, but I want to address the question as it applies in the United States.

In the case of pumas, when one asks where they come from, the answer is quite simple. In the first place, those states where pumas still officially exist are connected by land with those where they do not. If two dogs and a cat managed to cross the States from west to east, as chronicled in the book The Incredible Journey, it should not be impossible for some pumas to simply travel by land into areas where their species was extirpated by humans. (Discreet travel on their part would, of course, have been necessary).

In addition, some people keep pumas as pets. They may release them after a time, as they cost a lot to feed and when fully grown they look a trifle intimidating. Some may escape. These would perhaps account for a number of sightings.

Some people report sightings of "black cougars". The melanistic form of the puma is very rare. While some sources say it simply doesn't exist, there are two killings of them which seem well attested. Because of their scarcity it seems unlikely that alien big cats observed are melanistic pumas.

Large black out-of-place cats are usually described as "black panthers". It is much harder to explain how a population of genuine black panthers might get loose in the United States. However, there are other animals in Native American tradition which may be the source of the reports.

The devil-cat was the subject of Indian belief in days agone. It looked like a puma but was black and held to be a different animal. It had a tendency to carry off children and was much feared. A surviving population of these, which might for a time have existed in remote areas, may now be expanding its range. It does not sound as though this creature were a purely mythical animal.

There are also reports of a large black cat in American folklore called the wooleneag, which may be the same creature. This animal seems to have been frisking around colonial Maine. Both these creatures are mentioned in Loren Coleman's Mysterious America. It is hard to find information on the wooleneag. When I tried to locate it on a certain search engine, the reply Did you mean Woolen Bag? came up. Are that "black panthers" of America an undiscovered species?

Tuesday, 17 December 2013

If you lived in Asbury Park (NJ) in 1909, you must be very old. But you might have picked up a copy of the local newspaper, the Evening Press and read the astonishing story of Dan Possack.Dan, the article informs us, was approached by an 18 foot tall bird which proceeded to address him in English. Dan, unused to such encounters, took to his heels and his avian acquaintance went in hot pursuit. At length it caught up with him and seized him. A fight between the two ensued, but Dan had the advantage of having a hatchet, an implement large birds seldom carry. He struck his feathered pursuer, knocking out one of its eyes. The bird screamed, which is understandable in such trying circumstances, inflated its body and floated off.What first struck me upon reading this thrilling tale was that this was a hoax story of the type newspaper editors were in the habit of using to fill up space when it was a slow news day. But supposing there was some truth behind it, what could Dan Possack have encountered?I reckon, if the whole thing is not a fabrication, that the bird was an ostrich or cassowary. Dan would probably have recognized an ostrich and named it as such, but a cassowary is a much less known bird and it tends to be aggressive. If you don't believe me, next time you see a cassowary, pull its feathers and see how it responds. Cassowaries don't speak English, of course, but it might have made some noise that sounded like it. The only question was what a cassowary might have been doing in New Jersey. An illegal immigrant, perhaps?

Marina Chapman, photographed at age 17, now a granny living in England, but raised largely by monkeys.GIRL OF THE JUNGLE
A female Tarzan perhaps? Marina Chapman was taken from her Colombian home and left in the jungle. She claims she joined a troupe of capuchin monkeys, who at first ignored her. She would take refuge in the hollows of trees. One day she ate something unsavory which made her ill and she writhed about, howling with pain. An elderly monkey made her drink water, she vomited up the food and felt much better.

After this, the monkeys seemed to accept her more as one of their number. They groomed her and she groomed them. She learned basic monkey communication skills.

Eventually she was found by hunters, but sold into a brothel from which she escaped. She was adopted by a family who ultimately sent her to Bradford, Yorkshire, with which they had associations. She married a scientist and now has two daughters, Joanna (32) and Vanessa (28). Joanna now has children of her own.
Marina is particularly good at climbing trees.

Marina tells her story in a book which appeared last year,The Girl With No Name (Pegasus, $26.95). A paperback edition is due to appear in 2014.

Thursday, 12 December 2013

HOW DO REINDEER FLY?
Where, you might sometimes wonder, did people get the idea that Santa's reindeer flew? Some books will tell you that it derives from the notion that the Norse god Thor had a wagon pulled by flying goats. However, I think a more likely answer is to be found in Finland. Here they believed that Old Man Winter flew through the air in a sleigh pulled by reindeer. What, I hear you ask, is the origin of this belief? Finnish shamans probably induced an ecstatic condition in which they believed they were flying by ingesting fly agaric mushrooms; but these have an unhappy side effect, in that they make you throw up. Reindeer, however, consume these mushrooms without any such results and, if you then drink their urine, you will undergo the illusion that you are flying through the air. In this, I think, we probably have the origin of how reindeer and flying came to be associated. If you don't believe me, next time you're shopping, buy a bottle of reindeer urine and try it out.

CRUELTY TO DOGSWhen most people think of cruelty to dogs, they think of physical mistreatment and, indeed, there are shocking cases a-plenty of this. I, however, want to draw your attention to another kind of cruelty - deliberate inbreeding.I'm sure you are aware that in Dog Shows, breeds have to have the right number of points to win. Certain dog breeders, however, feel the best way to produce the dog most likely to win is to inbreed for as many generations as possible, in order to produce the 'perfect' dog.The result may be a dog that will win, but all sorts of physical deformities inside the dog can arise from this. Bulldogs, for example, can suffer from respiratory difficulties. The gene pools of many a canid are so small that numerous disorders can result.Nature has its own remedies to stop inbreeding. If there is a litter of young in a mammalian species, the females will attain maturity before the males and will mate with males from another litter. In humans, children who grow up together for their first six years with siblings do not (as a rule) find those siblings sexually attractive.But I am informed that there are people out there who, to have the "finest" dogs to place on show, use inbreeding to the point that dogs are produced which undergo a life of suffering. Those who organize dog shows should be persuaded, not alone to discourage this, but to take active steps against it. Those Dog Shows that do not should be boycotted by all who have the welfare of animals at heart.

Wednesday, 11 December 2013

In the 1993 film Jurassic Park, Jeff Goldblum's character Dr. Ian Malcolm says to John Hammond "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should"
This is the question now being raised, not in a fantasy film, but in a real life setting, and in a very serious and heated debate.

Japanese scientists hope to have woolly mammoths gracing parks across the globe by the year 2016. ( Please refer back to my March 18, 2011 blog post at Crypto Haven Research & Investigations titled " Lyuba, the little mammoth with a big story "
But Japan isn't the only country in the running.

In March of this year, scientists with The Lazarus Project in Australiamade the astonishing announcement that they had been able to clone embryos of an odd little amphibian known as the gastric brooding frog ( Look them up, you'll love what you learn about them ), which was declared extinct in 1979. A cousin to it, the northern gastric brooding frog was declared extinct in 1985. All succumbed to de-habitation and a nasty little destroyer of frogs known as the chytrid fungus.
De-exctinction, as it is called, is part of a newly emerging field of science called "revival biology". But it is at the very least a controversial subject, and the lines in the sand aren't clear enough yet to know which way this is going to go in the next five to ten years, let alone the distant future of genetics and DNA modification.
But one thought this brings up for me as a cryptozoologist is the question of exactly how long this has been going on and what creatures they have experimented with and created that we do not know about..........yet.

Could we actually be witness to mammoths roaming our zoos along with elephants and chimpanzees in the next handful of years? The answer seems to be a resounding YES.

But..........................should we?

Did these animals have their time on earth and die out for a reason?

Could bringing them back upset the current balance of nature even more than it is now?

Admittedly, I would probably shove through the line and push children out of the way be the first pair of eyes to catch a glimpse of a newly born Columbian mammoth in the Detroit Zoo.

Monday, 9 December 2013

A Grumble from MeIt is no unusual thing to see scientists grumble at Forteans, to which they zealously grumble back; but you would expect scientists to at least use logic in their deliberations. Don't misunderstand me...I am not one of those anti-scientists who goes around grumbling about the short-sightedness of the Establishment, though I don't deny it can be short-sighted at times.However, the other night I was doing what I do best, videlicet as little as possible, when a prominent scientist appeared on television. He proceeded to speak on the subject of alien abductions.Now, I don't have any opinion on the cause of alien abductions, be they real or imaginary. (Elegant use of Subjunctive there - readers please note). I feel we need a good deal more data on the phenomenon before we pronounce upon it; but this savant claimed to have the Answer."They don't happen," he informed us, "because if there were UFOs out there, our scientific devices would have picked them up."Now, this astronomer (for such he was) didn't seem to consider that any civilization that was so advanced that it could send conveyances light years across space would be more than able to evolve artifacts that could easily avoid detection by our puny satellites, telescopes, spacecraft and anything else we might have. If there are aliens who can send spacecraft so far, we must be a long way behind them. Their non-detection doesn't prove anything, positive or negative.As for why this is placed in a Crippled Zoology, I mean Cryptozoology, blog, the two subjects are at times not unconnected, although many a cryptozoologist has a somewhat illogical tendency to distance himself from all other paranormal phenomena.

Sunday, 8 December 2013

Snowflake, the long-lived gorilla who died in 2003, was famous for being the only known albino gorilla. He became a wildly popular attraction at the Barcelona Zoo in Spain, where he lived almost his entire life, becoming almost a mascot for the city. But until now, nobody knew why Snowflake looked the way he did.Now read on......www.posa.com/science/article/2013-06/famous-white gorilla-was-result-incest

Friday, 6 December 2013

This is the famous Patterson-Gimlin photograph, allegedly of Bigfoot. I thought I'd put it up so that you can study it at your leisure - it has generated much controversy in the cryptozoological world. Study it carefully - a human in costume or the Real Thing?

DNA analysis of two populations of wildcat in Brazil has shown that they're evolutionary distinct, allowing one to be recognised as a new species.Now read on.....www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-12/01/tigrina

Thursday, 5 December 2013

The second issue of the Journal of Cryptozoology is now available. This is a peer-reviewed journal, the only one of its kind dealing with this subject, with articles by fully qualified scientists, making it a must for researchers and academic libraries.The current issue deals with orang pendek, koolakamba the mystery ape, Spanish freshwater cryptids and the king cheetah.Edited by the renowned Dr Karl Shuker, it is available through all the usual sources.

Wednesday, 4 December 2013

The question arises in an earlier article of where Bigfoot is able to hide out so cleverly that, despite numerous reports, we never seem to find one. They have been seen in every state in the Union (yes, including Rhode Island, despite statements to the contrary). While bird watchers go bird watching, they see birds. Why do Bigfoot watchers never see Bigfoots/Bigfeet?Various explanations are put forward - the cunning of Bigfoot, partial hibernation of Bigfoot, maybe dead bodies are never found because they are eaten by other Bigfoot, etc. In heavily forested areas of the Pacific coast, in the wilds of Alaska, such explanations are fine; but what about the more populated areas?The first idea we must combat and the evidence seems to indicate we should combat it, is that If a thing is there, it is there all the time. Yet I seem to remember hearing that physicists now can send particles in and out of existence. Can the same thing happen with a great clump of particles like Bigfoot?While I do not discount such an explanation utterly, I think there is a more likely explanation. Physicists now admit the idea of coexisting universes. As far as I am aware, coexisting dimensions would not cause a scientist to scoff. Could it be that Bigfoot, when chased, simply crosses the line into the other dimension and is no more discernable? The answer is that we don't know, but it does not make the idea of the existence rather than the non-existence of Bigfoot seem quite so incredible.

The Wonders of DNA

Unless you are some kind of hermit and haven't come down from your mountain retreat for half a century, you'll have heard of DNA. It's what we inherit from our ancestors. For further description, see Wikipedia. However, now that DNA has been discovered, some amazing characteristics of it have become established.

It now appears that Memory is, at least to a degree, passed down through DNA. At Emory University School of Medicine, they have discovered that experiences of mice are passed down from generation to generation. If that is the case, the implications for future generations could be quite staggering.

The way in which this was discovered was that mice were given an aversion to the scent of cherry blossom. Their offspring consequently avoided cherry blossom or its aroma. The same happened with the next generation. As far as this line of mousehood was concerned, cherry blossom was out. The structure of the brain was also affected by the experience.

Scientists argue that this may be a cause of irrational phobias. If your ancestor had an unpleasant experience with spiders, he will pass on to you a fear of such creatures. The use of this in dealing with psychological disorders must be clear.

However, a UFO website has taken an imaginative jump and asked if actual memories of our ancestors are stored in there. Will further research show that there is such a thing as hereditary memory which will enable us to see what our ancestors saw? Will pictures of animals now extinct, will the sensations of experiences undergone be subject to recall. Will we be able to fill in the large blank in human experience that is called prehistory? Who can say.....

Tuesday, 3 December 2013

One of my favorite authors, Dan Simmons, has recently taken
his turn at tracking the Yeti in a new novel, The Abominable. Known for
knocking it out of the park in all genres, from crime noir to sci-fi and
horror, Dan's trademark is also huge books that are both bestsellers and, some
would say, doorstops. Haven't cracked this one yet, myself, but am looking
forward to it at the earliest opportunity. Here's a new review from the Washington
Post.

Monday, 2 December 2013

Just a quick drive-by for now, to say how thrilled I am to be involved
with the new site. Boundless thanks to John Downes for the idea and the
hookup; also to Ronan Coghlan for smoothing out the bumps. Let the
adventure begin!

A word about cryptolinks: we are not responsible for the content of cryptolinks, which are merely links to outside articles that we think are interesting (sometimes for the wrong reasons), usually posted up without any comment whatsoever from me.

A word about cryptolinks: we are not responsible for the content of cryptolinks, which are merely links to outside articles that we think are interesting (sometimes for the wrong reasons), usually posted up without any comment.

At the Sasquatch Summit almost everyone had a story about that “first time” they encountered the allusive creature, known as Sasquatch, Yeti or Bigfoot.

Esther Schritter of Sweet Home, Ore. remembers her first Bigfoot experience as a toddler in the early ’60s peering through the big ivory drapes of her childhood home in Oklahoma.

“A creature looked in, but before my dad and brother could get the shotgun, he was gone,” said Schritter, who has traveled to many similar events, and participated in Bigfoot documentaries. “I always thought it was a monster, it wasn’t until I watched ‘The Legend of Boggy Creek’ that I realized what it was … And I’ve had many experiences since then.”

The summit, a three-day event held for the first time at the Quinault Beach Resort & Casino last weekend, recorded more than 150 people in attendance the first day, according to the casino.

Even at 6-foot-9, psychologist Matthew Johnson of Puyallup, one of the event’s speakers, trembles and sheds a tear when he recalls his first — a “Class A”— encounter in July of 2000. Compelling and obviously well-rehearsed from rehashing the story so many times, Johnson, or “Dr. J,” recalls with clarity each moment of that day he hiked a ways away from his family on the Big Tree Loop Trail at Oregon Caves National Monument to relieve himself. The family had smelled something “putrid” and heard “bass, guttural” noises earlier, but they had figured they were in Oregon, and safe from threats like bears or cougars.

But about 60 feet away from his family, including his wife and three young children, Johnson said he saw a giant creature that he did not recognize turn and look at him. It was then, he said, that his world changed.

“It was then that everything I knew about the woods came crashing down,” said Johnson, who said he had not believed in Bigfoot prior to his experience. “My brain did a crash and reboot, and my protective instincts kicked in, I had to get my family out of there … It was the scariest hour of my life.”

A word about cryptolinks: we are not responsible for the content of cryptolinks, which are merely links to outside articles that we think are interesting (sometimes for the wrong reasons), usually posted up without any comment.

This past weekend was the official screening of Dead Bigfoot: A True Story by Ro Sahebi starring and documenting the story of Justin Smeja, a man who claims to have shot both an adult and juvenile bigfoot in the Sierra Nevada mountain range of California.

The documentary is now available for streaming through the deadbigfoot.com website for the low, low, price of $3.99. You can pay either with credit card or paypal account, and the system is very easy to navigate and get rolling.

Dead Bigfoot is a chronological journey of Ro Sahebi as he delves into the story of Justin Smeja. The documentary does a fantastic job of putting things in order and uncovering the facts of how things transpired, putting a rest to the rumors and hearsay that have run rampant since the name Justin Smeja began popping up around the bigfoot community. Ro does a fantastic job at allowing Justin to put things into his own words, showing his perspective of the event, and the aftermath of his story going public.

We would like to apologize for the fact that the e-mail links to your editors are not working yet. Our technical expert, J. Downes, is going to rectify this as soon as he gets a new screwdriver, which is apparently the implement you need when repairing a computer. He has been trying to fix it with a rectal thermometer, but it was not equal to the task.

A word about cryptolinks: we are not responsible for the content of cryptolinks, which are merely links to outside articles that we think are interesting (sometimes for the wrong reasons), usually posted up without any comment.

Whether we want to accept it or not, there are only two ways we can take the subject of Bigfoot; either they are the world's most exceptionally shy and elusive tribe or Bigfoot is a hoax perpetuated by thousands of people and continued today for reasons that are unclear.

Talk about a world of insanity?

No wonder Bigfootery has attracted everyone from charlatans and thieves, opportunists and killers to philosophers and intellects, artists to weekend archaeologists.

Did you ever hear the phrase, “you can't be sorta pregnant?” Bigfoot either does or does not exist.

Given those two options, we can make only two conclusions; exceptional skills that exceed our own crafty ones or has never existed but is a mass urban legend chased by well meaning believers of the Cult of Bigfoot.

Tuesday, 29 October 2013

This was taken on a game cam in Cleveland County near Kingsland, Arkansas on 10/15/2013. Looks like a cat to me, but others have said that it looks like a small bear. I clearly see a tail, but I could be wrong. Thoughts?Read more...

Monday, 28 October 2013

The Centre for Fortean Zoology is the world's largest cryptozoology organization. Cryptozoology is the study of those animals whose existence has been rumored, reported or been the subject of legend or folklore, but has not yet been proven. However, we cover a much wider spectrum than this at the Centre. We study animal reports of a paranormal character, which we term zooform phenomena. Because such creatures are widely reported, we try to discover if they have an objective existence.

We are also interested in allied subjects such as conservation, animal welfare and anomalous phenomena of sundry kinds. The word Fortean is taken from Charles Hoy Fort, whose practice it was to scour papers in both the United States and Britain with the aim of discovering reports which seemed to relate to incidents outside the spectrum of contemporary belief. It is perhaps a sobering thought that many established facts today would have been deemed impossibilities in the days when Fort pursued his quest.

Above all, we seek to stimulate the coming generations with an interest in the wonders of the earth, the value of its components and the use of imagination in investigation. Einstein said imagination was more important than knowledge, no doubt because knowledge is the study of what is already known and what may be inferred from it, whereas imagination stimulates you to look into untrodden areas where you will discover things hitherto unconceived, whose existence has lain long unguessed.

In many works cryptozoology is listed as a pseudo-science and one has to ask if this is fair. Science originally meant knowledge of any kind - it comes from the Latin scientia, which means just that. However, cryptozoology doesn't just search for unknown animals, it searches for legendary animals to see if any fact lies behind them. Now, one of the criteria for something being a science these days is that any proposition put forward must be falsifiable. If Bigfoot is a creature of legend, a scientist cannot falsify the proposition that it might be out there. Hence, many say cryptozoology is a pseudo-science.

One cannot really maintain such a standpoint, however: cryptozoology is the search to see if something is falsifiable or not. Scientists will have to expand their definitions of what science actually is, or else we'll never end up looking for the undiscovered, as I am sure there is much to discover about the cosmos which is at present not falsifiable - but that doesn't mean it isn't out there or that it is pseudo-scientific to suggest that it might be.